Entertainment

Host Your Website in Salesforce.com’s Cloud with Force.com Sites

Salesforce.com is adding a major new component to its platform: allowing developers to run their external facing websites and applications on top of the company’s infrastructure. The new offering, called Force.com Sites, is aimed primarily at existing Salesforce.com customers.

Since those customers already use Salesforce.com for business tasks like managing customer relationships, human resources, and customer support, the idea is that by moving your website and other external apps to Force.com Sites, your company can use a single common architecture – in this case, Salesforce.com’s “cloud.” Like other cloud computing offerings, Salesforce.com is charging based on usage, with certain levels of page views included as part of the company’s existing subscription options.

As an example, ThomasNet (a marketplace for industrial products) uses Salesforce.com for managing their recruitment efforts. Now, they’ve moved job applications over to Force.com Sites, and those submissions flow right into the company’s Salesforce.com app. Previously, this would require a Salesforce.com customer to integrate with their existing job site, but now, it can be turned on and managed all through the Web interface that Salesforce provides.

While inevitably Force.com Sites will be compared to the likes of Amazon S3 and Google App Engine, realistically it’s much more of an extension of Salesforce.com’s existing capabilities as opposed to another option for hosting websites. The company already has a robust developer community, and now, those apps can be both internal and external facing. In turn, this will drive more usage – and more revenue – for Salesforce.com.

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